page_title: Pather Panchali
section_title: Soundtrack
hierarchical_section_title: Pather Panchali / Soundtrack
caption_attribution_description: English: Satyajit Ray with Ravi Sankar music recording for Pather Panchali (1955)
context_page_description: Pather Panchali is a 1955 Indian Bengali-language drama film written and directed by Satyajit Ray and produced by the Government of West Bengal. It is based on Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's 1929 Bengali novel of the same name and is Ray's directorial debut. It features Subir Banerjee, Kanu Banerjee, Karuna Banerjee, Uma Dasgupta and Chunibala Devi. The first film in The Apu Trilogy, Pather Panchali depicts the childhood of the protagonist Apu and his elder sister Durga and the harsh village life of their poor family.
  Production was interrupted because of funding problems and it took nearly three years for the film to be completed. The film was shot mainly on location, had a limited budget, featured mostly amateur actors, and was made by an inexperienced crew. The sitar player Ravi Shankar composed the film's soundtrack and score using classical Indian ragas. Subrata Mitra was in charge of the cinematography while editing was handled by Dulal Dutta. Following its premiere on 3 May 1955 during an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Pather Panchali was released in Calcutta later the same year to an enthusiastic reception.
context_section_description: The soundtrack of the film was composed by the sitar player Ravi Shankar, who was at an early stage of his career, having debuted in 1939. The background scores feature pieces based on several ragas of Indian classical music, played mostly on the sitar. The soundtrack, described in a 1995 issue of The Village Voice as "at once plaintive and exhilarating", is featured in The Guardian's 2007 list of 50 greatest film soundtracks. It has also been cited as an influence on The Beatles, specifically George Harrison.
  Shankar saw about half the film in a roughly edited version before composing the background score, but he was already familiar with the story. According to Robinson, when Ray met Shankar the latter hummed a tune that was folk-based but had "a certain sophistication". This tune, usually played on a bamboo flute, became the main theme for the film. The majority of the score was composed within the duration of a single night, in a session that lasted for about eleven hours. Shankar also composed two solo sitar pieces—one based on the raga Desh (traditionally associated with rain), and one sombre piece based on the raga Todi. He created a piece based on the raga Patdeep, played on the tar shehnai, to accompany the scene in which Harihar learns of Durga's death. The film's cinematographer, Subrata Mitra, performed on the sitar for parts of the soundtrack.
caption: Ravi Shankar at a meeting with Satyajit Ray for the sounds in the movie (1955)
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